Forest is the administration interface to rule them all

If you work for a startup, chances are that you use four different software-as-a-service platforms to manage your orders, clients and products. French startup Forest started as part of eFounders’ startup studio and wants to unify all these administration interfaces into a single platform so that you don’t have to switch back and forth between all those products.

Think about Forest as a sort of Squarespace for admin interfaces. It’s a visual all-in-one platform to perform the most common tasks without any particular technical knowledge.

The product is divided into two main categories. On the dashboard page, you can keep an eye on your company’s metrics to see how you’re doing today, this week or this month. Everything is customizable.

But the true value is on the second category, the data one. Forest lets you interact with your data across your company’s database and your third-party tools. You can search, customize columns, save overviews, segment your user base, get charts and more.

And this is all about providing you a simple interface for all your daily activities. For instance, a customer support representative will be able to look at Intercom’s messages and issue a refund on Stripe without leaving Forest.

It makes it much easier when it comes to managing authorizations. For instance, when somebody joins your company, you don’t need to grant them access to five different tools. They only need Forest. Similarly, you can restrict some features so that your interns can’t destroy your entire database.

So far, Forest works with your own application, Stripe, Intercom, Close.io and Mixpanel. The company is thinking about building integrations with Zendesk and Salesforce soon.

“We don’t reinvent Intercom inside Forest,” founder and CEO Sandro Munda told me. “If you want to go further with Intercom, you get a link to open Intercom. We really focus on daily interactions.”

Forest is completely free for now. There will be premium features, but it’s all about getting companies to sign up for now. So far, around a hundred companies are using Forest. Forest can’t see your company’s data as the product interacts directly with your data.

Clients really like that they can interact with the database from Forest, which makes it quite easy if you want to extend a free trial, upgrade a user to premium status and more. It makes it much faster to get your startup off the ground.